The Open Work is a collection of Umberto Eco's essays, some of which appeared in Il Menabò di letteratura journal before being published in a book form. It had a few differing editions in Italian, and in consequence now, in different languages, the selection of contents might be quite different from one The Open Work to another. In this regard, the book resembles the notions it has introduced.
The central and probably present in all editions is the essay "The Poetics of the Open Work" which analyses the notion of openness in art. This is applied to art in general, with literature taking the forefront, but with music as the main inspiration as Eco opens up with talking directly about pioneering pieces that had some degree of indeterminacy involved:
- Karlheinz Stockhausen, Klavierstück XI (1952) —
- Pierre Boulez, Third Piano Sonata (1955) —
- Henri Pousseur, Scambi (1957) —
- Luciano Berio, Sequenza I For Flute (1958) —
Openness in art is analyzed in the context of broader cultural phenomena. There is a regular recurrence of a few themes from different areas: James Joyce (literature), Bertold Brecht (theatre), John Dewey (philosophy), Zen Buddhism (religion), Gestalt vs transactional (psychology), quantum (physics), and also: theory of information and game theory (mathematics).
Here's how the open work is currently defined in our glossary:
A work of art which is not fully determined by its author.
The above definition is not taken directly from the book, and is only one of a few referred from Eco. A frequent modern usage, but in fact, this understanding maybe should rather be linked to the term "work in movement" , 12), or between it and the "second degree of openness", as used by Eco. With the ambiguities involved, you may even interpret any other kind of work to be impossible.
For Eco, maybe the more central aspect is the meaning intended to be co-created by the audience in the work with unchanging form. As there were many types of openness considered at once, the term was adopted rather inconsistently to different languages and was picked up in game studies with a similar high level of fuzziness.
References
📜 Eco, Umberto. 1989 [1968]. The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
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